March 30, 2016
If the amount of time I ‘put in’ were commensurate with actual finished product, I would have amassed a substantial body of work by now, several groaning shelves worth, if not of a Jamesian or Dostoevskian amplitude, then at least in the Flaubertian range. Although, admittedly, most of the time that was supposed to be spent immersed in disciplined endeavor has been lost in a haze of abstraction. All these thoughts and memories – all these notes – will perish with me, and maybe that’s for the best. Why save them from inevitable oblivion? If only to bespeak the gulf between what one imagines one is capable of and what one actually is capable of, and the folly of continuing to work on something when one knows in advance that it is a failure. Who am I kidding? The only person I’m kidding is myself. Nobody else is invested enough to be in on the joke.
Posted in Prose of Regret and Resentment |
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March 23, 2016
Instead of doing my own work,
I took a long hard look
at somebody else’s work,
in the hope of being pleasantly relieved
by how bad it was.
But, much as I tried to deny it,
it was undeniably good.
And it pours out of him
like a gusher from a golden fountain
that never stops flowing.
Compared to this strained trickle
from a blocked and rusty faucet.
I take consolation
in how much it has cost me,
as if that might somehow redeem it.
Which, of course, it doesn’t.
But I don’t have much else
to take consolation in.
Posted in Magnanimous Misanthropy, Poems of regret and Resentment |
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March 15, 2016
And so, lost to myself, I find myself again, incapable of losing myself, in a state unfit for discharging what I stubbornly and unconvincingly still cling to the notion of as being my duty, weighed down by the forces that were supposed to raise me, sinking into a lyre-backed chair amid the flickerings and trillings of a hot February morning. Despite the best of intentions, things didn’t go according to plan. A few sentences were squeezed out like the rancid dregs from an almost empty bottle, long past its expiration date. The results, when viewed, will probably strike me as nothing I’d care to share. But at least a few lines emerged.
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March 7, 2016
I stared at you with lust, pity and loathing,
otherwise known as love:
projecting my fantasies on to your realities,
in the hope of spoiling
this hazy embodiment of desire
with pointless needs.
Another incarnation of immateriality
that becomes a necessity:
demanding some sort of release.
Posted in Antiepithalamia |
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John Tottenham 